The Healthcare Content Marketing Cycle

Healthcare content marketing is very effective and produces good ROI. It’s a robust marketing strategy that supports patient education and benefits the community while helping to streamline your business practices at your healthcare facility. But you can’t “do” healthcare marketing today and cross it off your list. You really need to think of it as a healthcare content marketing cycle, rather than as a to-do item.

Listening

Start by listening — identifying the concerns your visitors have. Your patients and clients tell you every day what questions they have and what they’re worrying about, so this part is easier for medical professionals than for other industries.

Providing information isn’t the whole point of healthcare content marketing, though. The “marketing” part involves knowing your customers’ path to purchase and understanding what will bring them in and keep them loyal.

Strategize

Don’t skip this step. Random bursts of enthusiastic content creation don’t work — and they’re not cost-effective. You need to develop content for all the important points along that path to purchase.

Create

This is the toughest item on the list for most marketers. If you’re working in the health and wellness space, you probably don’t have a writer on staff. It makes sense to have a company like Haden Interactive to create content for you on a regular basis. Contact us to discuss your needs.

Distribute

Once you have suitable content, you need to make sure that it reaches the right people. Here are some of the ways that you can make sure you get the most bang for your content creation buck:

Publish a blog post.

Link to your blog post from all your social media channels.

Send the post in your regular newsletter.

Create a PDF version to distribute to patients or clients.

Write a guest post summing up your topic and linking back to multiple blog posts.

Share the link in emails to individuals who might enjoy it.

Send a copy to journalists in your community.

Schedule additional social media posts for the future.

Measure

You’ll want to think about the amount of traffic your content receives, but there are other metrics you can use:

Engagement

Types of responses and comments

Conversion at your website

Targeted traffic

Sharing on other people’s social media

Links from other websites

Clicks through from email shares

Keyword rankings

Optimize

Of course, your content should be optimized for SEO visibility and conversion before you post it. But you should also use the data you get after publication to identify ways you can optimize your content — and lessons for the future.

Terry Pratchett said that “names sell newspapers,” and we’ve found that this is true online as well. A bit of news about one of your doctors may get a lot more engagement than you’d expect. If so, watch for opportunities to add that kind of news to your content.

Repurpose

Your content might start out as a blog post, but it can also make a valuable infographic or e-book. You might create a video and find that it will anchor a blog post. A team member’s presentation could be a terrific social media post.

Whatever content you have, think of ways to get the most out of it by putting it into other formats.

Keep cycling.

Fresh, original content posted and promoted on a regular basis is the lifeblood of healthcare content marketing.